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New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick turned to science on Saturday to explain why the team’s game-day footballs were slightly deflated during last weekend’s American Football Conference championship match against the Indianapolis Colts.
But according to Bill Nye the Science Guy, Belichick’s reasoning doesn’t add up.
Nye, a mechanical engineer best known for his 1990s television show Bill Nye, the Science Guy, appeared on Good Morning America Sunday morning to squash Belichick’s claims surrounding “Deflate-gate” — that is, allegations the Patriots intentionally deflated game balls below NFL regulation to gain an advantage.
New England is slated to compete in the Super Bowl against the Seattle Seahawks on Feb. 1.
During a press conference Saturday, Belichick reportedly said the Patriots recreated a typical game-day setup, and followed “every rule, to the letter.”
He reasoned that climatic conditions and rubbing the footballs ahead of last weekend’s game affected their air pressure, according to an ESPN transcript of his remarks:
“So we simulated a game-day situation in terms of the preparation of the footballs and where the balls [were] at various [points] in the day or night, as the case was Sunday.
Bill Belichick
I would say that our preparation process for the footballs is what we do — I can’t speak for anybody else, it’s what we do — and that [preparation] process we have found raises the PSI [pounds per square inch] approximately one pound [per square inch].
That process of creating a tackiness, a texture, the right feel, whatever that feel is, a sensation for the quarterback — that process elevates the PSI approximately one pound [per square inch] based on what our study showed, which was multiple footballs, multiple examples in the process as we would do for a game. It’s not one football,” said Bill Belichick
Belichick continued:
“We found that once the footballs were on the field over an extended period of time — in other words they were adjusted to the climatic conditions and also the fact that the footballs, which an equilibrium without the rubbing process after that had run its course and the footballs reached an equilibrium — that they were down approximately 1.5 pounds per square inch.
When we brought the footballs back in after that process and retested them in a controlled environment as we have here, then those measurements rose approximately 0.5 PSI.
